History Assessments of Thinking: A Validity Study

Abstract

This article reports a validity study of History Assessments of Thinking (HATs), which are short, constructed-response assessments of historical thinking. In particular, this study focuses on aspects of cognitive validity, which is an examination of whether assessments tap the intended constructs. Think-aloud interviews with 26 high school students were used to examine the thinking elicited by 8 HATs and multiple-choice versions of these tasks. Results showed that although both HATs and multiple-choice items tapped historical thinking processes, HATs better reflected student proficiency in historical thinking than their multiple-choice counterparts. Item format also influenced the thinking elicited, with multiple-choice items eliciting more instances of construct-irrelevant reasoning than the constructed-response versions. Implications for history assessment are discussed.

Keywords:

• Historical thinking
• assessment
• validity
• history education

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Library of Congress’s Teaching with Primary Sources program and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Contract No. 19308), Sam Wineburg, principal investigator. Although we acknowledge the generosity of our funders, we alone are responsible for the contents contained herein. We thank Rich Shavelson and Ed Haertel for their guidance in this work, and Jim Pellegrino for encouraging us not to give up on this article until it reached publication. This research would never have gotten off the ground without the invaluable aid of Rob McEntarffer, Randy Ernst, and Teresa Wanser-Ernst. We thank them all.